1) AT: COALITIONS Even radical coalitions are anti-black

reproduce the policing function

2) Must end the world Blackness is in a position of absolute
dereliction cannot survive in civil society.
Wilderson 2007 [Frank B., The Prison Slave as Hegemonys Silent Scandal in
Warfare in the American Homeland ed. Joy James, p. 23-4]
There is something organic to black positionality that makes it essential to
the destruction of civil society. There is nothing willful or speculative in this
state ment, for one could just as well state the claim the other way around: There is
something organic to civil society that makes it essential to the destruction of the
black body. Blackness is a positionality of "absolute dereliction" (Frantz
Fanon), abandonment, in the face of civil society and therefore cannot
establish itself, or be established, through hegemonic interventions.
Blackness cannot be come one of civil society's many junior partners:
black citizenship and black civic obligation are oxymorons.! In light of this,
coalitions and social movements-even radical social move ments such as
the prison abolition movement, bound up in the solicitation of hegemony
so as to fortify and extend the interlocutory life of civil society ultimately
accommodate only the satiable demands and finite antagonisms of civil
society's junior partners (i.e., immigrants, white women, and the working
class), but foreclose on the insatiable demands and endless antagonisms
of the prison slave and the prison slave-in-waiting. In short, whereas such
coalitions and social movements cannot be called the outright handmaidens
of white su premacy, their rhetorical structures and political desire are
underwritten by a supplemental antiblackness. Assata Shakur's comments
in her autobiography vacillate between being interesting and insightful and
painfully programmatic and "responsible." The expository method of conveyance
accounts for this air of responsibility. How ever, toward the end of the book, she
accounts for coalition work by way of ex tended narrative as opposed to
exposition. We accompany her one of Zayd Shakur's many Panther projects with
outside groups, work "dealing with white support groups who were involved in
raising bail for the Panther 21 members in jail."2 With no more than three words,
her recollection becomes matter of fact and unfiltered. She writes, "I hated it." At
the time, i felt that anything below Hoth street was another country. All my activities
were centered in Harlem and i almost never left it. Doing de fense committee work
was definitely not up my alley.... i hated standing around while all these white
people asked me to explain myself, my exis tence. i became a master of the oneliner.3 Assata's hatred of this work is bound up in her anticipation, fully
realized, of all the zonal violations to come when a white woman asks her
whether Zayd is her "panther ... you know, is he your black cat?" and then
runs her fingers through her hair to cop a kinky feel. Her narrative
anticipates these violations to-come at the level of the street, as well as at the
level of the body. Here is the moment in her life as a prison slave-in-waiting,
which is to say, a moment as an ordinary black person, when she finds herself
among "friends" abolitionists, at least partners in purpose, and yet she feels
it necessary to adopt the same muscular constriction, the same coiled

anticipation, the same com bative "one-liners" that she will need to adopt just
one year later to steel herself against the encroachment of prison guards.
The verisimilitude between Assata's well-known police encounters and her
experiences in civil society's most nurturing nook, the radical coalition, raises
disturbing questions about political desire, black positionality, and
hegemony as a modality of struggle.

AT: Coalitions Black bodies magenitize bullets and Whites do

not. There can be no coalition because white people
embody/are deputized to be the police.
Wilderson 2007 [Frank B., The Prison Slave as Hegemonys Silent Scandal in
Warfare in the American Homeland ed. Joy James, p. 25-6]

In "The Avant-Garde of White Supremacy," Steve Martinot and Jared Sexton assert
the primacy of Fanon's Manichean zones (without the promise of higher unity), even
in the face of American integration facticity. Fanon's speCific colo nial context does
not share Martinot's and Sexton's historical or national con text. Common to both
texts, however, is the settler-native dynamic, the differ ential zoning, and the
gratuity (as opposed to the contingency) ofviolence that accrues to the blackened
position: The dichotomy between white ethics (the discourse of civil society]
and its irrelevance to the violence of police profiling is not dialectical; the
two are incommensurable whenever one attempts to speak about the paradigm
of policing, one is forced back into a discussion of particular events high-profile
homicides and their related courtroom battles, for instance.6 It makes no difference
that in the United States the "casbah" and the "Euro pean" zone are laid one on top
of the other. What is being asserted here is an isomorphic schematic relation-the
schematic interchangeability-between Fanon's settler society and Martinot's and
Sexton's policing paradigm. For Fanon, it is the policeman and soldier (not the
discursive, or hegemonic, agents) of co lonialism that make one town white and the
other black. For Martinot and Sex ton, this Manichean delirium manifests itself by
way of the u.s. paradigm of policing that (re)produces, repetitively, the
inside-outside, the civil society-black world, by virtue of the difference
between those bodies that do not magnetize bullets and those that do.
"Police impunity serves to distinguish between the racial itself and the elsewhere
that mandates it ... the distinction between those whose human being is put
permanently in question and those for whom it goes without saying."7 In such a
paradigm, white people are, ipso facto, deputized in the face of black
people , whether they know it (consciously) or not. Whiteness, then-and, by
extension, civil society cannot be solely "represented" as some monumentalized
coherence of phallic signifiers but must first be understood as a social
formation of contemporaries who do not magnetize bullets. This is the
essence of their construction through an asignifying absence; their signifying
presence is manifested by the fact that they are, if only by default, deputized
against those who do magnetize bullets. In short, white people are not simply
"protected" by the police. They are-in their very corporeality-the police.
This ipso facto deputization of white people in the face of black people accounts for

Fanon's materiality and Martinot's and Sexton's Manichean delirium in America.

What remains to be addressed, however, is the way in which the political
contestation between civil society's junior partners (Le., workers, white women,
and immigrants), on the one hand, and white-supremacist institutionality, on the
other hand, is produced by, and reproductive of, a supplemental
antiblackness. Put another way: How is the production and accumulation of
junior partners' social capital [is] dependent on an antiblack rhetorical
structure and a decomposed black body? Any serious musing on the question
of antagonistic identity formation-a formation, the mass mobilization of which
can precipitate a crisis in the institutions and assumptive logic that undergird the
United States of America-must come to grips with the contradictions between
the political demands of radical social movements, such as the large
prison abolition movement, which seeks to abolish the prison-industrial complex,
and the ideological structure that under writes its political desire. I contend
that the positionality of black subjectivity is at the heart of those
contradictions and that this unspoken desire is bound up with the political
limitations of naturalized and uncritically accepted categories that have their
genesis mainly in the works of Antonio Gramsci namely, work or labor, the wage,
exploitation, hegemony, and civil society. I wish to theorize the symptoms of
rage and resignation I hear in the words of George Jackson when he boils reform
down to a single word, "fascism," or in Assata's brief declaration, "i hated it," as well
as in the Manichean delirium of Fanon, Martinot, and Sexton. Today, the failure of
radical social movements to em brace symptoms of all three gestures is
tantamount to the reproduction of an antiblack politics that nonetheless
represents itself as being in the service of the emancipation of the black
prison slave.

Blackness is off the map. Absolute disorder and incoherence

of civil society. We must do the dance with death and negate
the world.
Wilderson 2007 [Frank B., The Prison Slave as Hegemonys Silent Scandal in
Warfare in the American Homeland ed. Joy James, p. 31-2]

Slavery is the great leveler of the black subject's positionality. The black American
subject does not generate historical categories of entitlement,
sovereignty, and immigration for the record. We are "off the map" with
respect to the cartography that charts civil society's semiotics; we have a past but
not a heritage. To the data-generating demands of the Historical Axis, we present a
virtual blank, much like that which the Khoisan presented to the Anthropological
Axis. This places us in a structurally impossible position, one that is
outside the articulations of hegemony. However, it also places hegemony
in a structurally impossible position because-and this is key-our presence
works back on the grammar of hegemony and threatens it with incoherence.
If every subject even the most massacred among them, Indians-is required to have
analogs within the nation's structuring narrative, and the experience of one subject
on whom the nation's order of wealth was built is without analog, then that subject's
presence destabilizes all other analogs. Fanon writes, "Decolonization, which sets

out to change the order of the world, is, obviously, a program of complete
disorder.nIl If we take him at his word, then we must accept that no other body
functions in the Imaginary, the Symbolic, or the Real so completely as a repository
of complete disorder as the black body. Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction
at the level of the Real, for in its magnetizing of bullets the black body functions as
the map of gratuitous violence through which civil society is possible-namely, those
bodies for which violence is, or can be, contingent. Blackness is the site of absolute
dereliction at the level of the Symbolic, for blackness in America generates no
categories for the chromosome of history and no data for the categories of
immigration or sovereignty. It is an experience without analog-a past without a
heritage. Blackness is the site of absolute dereliction at the level of the Imagi nary,
for "whoever says 'rape' says Black" (Fanon), whoever says "prison" says
black (Sexton), and whoever says "AIDS" says black-the "Negro is a phobogenic
object."13 Indeed, it means all those things: a phobogenic object, a past without
a heritage, the map of gratuitous violence, and a program of complete
disorder. Whereas this realization is, and should be, cause for alarm, it should not
be cause for lament or, worse, disavowal-not at least, for a true revolutionary or for
a truly revolutionary movement such as prison abolition. If a social move ment is
to be neither social-democratic nor Marxist in terms of structure of
political desire, then it should grasp the invitation to assume the
positionality of subjects of social death. If we are to be honest with ourselves,
we must admit that the "Negro" has been inviting whites, as well as civil
society's junior partners, to the dance of social death for hundreds of years,
but few have wanted to learn the steps. They have been, and remain todayeven in the most antiracist movements, such as the prison abolition movementinvested elsewhere. This is not to say that all oppositional political desire
today is pro-white, but it is usually antiblack, meaning that it will not
dance with death. Black liberation, as a prospect, makes radicalism more
dangerous to the United States. This is not because it raises the specter of
an alternative polity (such as socialism or community control of existing
resources), but because its condition of possibility and gesture of
resistance function as a negative dialec tic: a politics of refusal and a
refusal to affirm, a "program ofcomplete disorder." One must embrace its
disorder, its incoherence, and allow oneself to be elabo rated by it if,
indeed, one's politics are to be underwritten a desire to take down this
country. If this is not the desire that underwrites one's politics, then
through what strategy of legitimation is the word "prison" being linked to
the word "abolition"? What are this movement's lines of political accountability?
There is nothing foreign, frightening, or even unpracticed about the embrace of
disorder and incoherence. The desire to be embraced, and elaborated, by disorder
and incoherence is not anathema in and of itself. No one, for example, has ever
been known to say, "Gee-whiz, if only my orgasms would end a little sooner, or
maybe not come at all." Yet few so-called radicals desire to be embraced, and
elaborated, by the disorder and incoherence of blackness-and the state of political
movements in the United States today is marked by this very Negrophobogenisis:
"Gee-whiz, if only black rage could be more coherent, or maybe not come at all."
Perhaps there is something more terrifying about the joy of black than
there is in the joy of sex (unless one is talking sex with a Negro). Perhaps

coalitions today prefer to remain inorgasmic in the face of civil society-with

hegemony as a handy prophylactic, just in case. If through this stasis or
paralysis they try to do the work of prison abolition, the work will fail, for
it is always work from a position of coherence (Le., the worker) on behalf of
a position of incoherence of the black subject, or prison slave. In this way,
social formations on the left remain blind to the contradictions of coalitions
between workers and slaves. They remain coalitions operating within the logic
of civil society and function less as revolutionary promises than as
crowding out scenarios of black antagonisms, simply feeding our frustration.
Whereas the positionality of the worker (whether a factory worker demand ing a
monetary wage, an immigrant, or a white woman demanding a social wage)
gestures toward the reconfiguration of civil society, the positionality of the black
subject (whether a prison slave or a prison slave-in-waiting) gestures toward the
disconfiguration of civil society. From the coherence of civil so ciety, the black
subject beckons with the incoherence of civil war, a war that re claims
blackness not as a positive value but as a politically enabling site, to quote
Fanon, of "absolute dereliction." It is a "scandal" that rends civil society asun der.
Civil war, then, becomes the unthought, but never forgotten, understudy of
hegemony. It is a black specter waiting in the wings, an endless antagonism
that cannot be satisfied (via reform or reparation) but that must,
nonetheless, be pursued to the death.